Author Archives: Denise Simon

Due to Haiti, No White House Run for Hillary

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There are countless reasons to keep the Clintons out of the White House in 2017. Many of them are obvious including sex scandals, Benghazi, Travelgate and Hillary’s most recent declaration that we must come to understand the reasons that militant Islamists have for killing, in short be sensitive to their condition. Yeah sure. But let’s take a look at a matter ignored for many years and that is Haiti.

Hillary’s Half-Baked Haiti Project

Caracol Industrial Park is failing to deliver on the promises made to foreign investors and Haitians.

On the fifth anniversary of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti remains a poster child for waste, fraud and corruption in the handling of aid. Nowhere is the bureaucratic ineptitude and greed harder to accept than at the 607-acre Caracol Industrial Park, a project launched by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with U.S. taxpayer money, under the supervision of her husband Bill and his Clinton Foundation.

Between the State Department and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which hands out grants to very poor countries thanks to U.S. generosity, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on this park in an attempt to attract apparel manufacturers. But the park is falling far short of the promises made to provide investors with necessary infrastructure. If things continue this way, frustrated investors will look for greener pastures.

Successful industrial parks are built by people who know the business and who demand accountability. This park was put in the hands of State, the IDB and Bill Clinton. The results have been predictable.

I had been warned about Caracol going to the dogs by sources on the ground in Haiti. So last month I traveled east by truck from Cap Haitien, across the poor rural north of the country to see if the alarm was justified. I found a project in trouble. It can be saved, but only if it is handed over to professionals with skin in the game.

On paper Caracol makes sense. Thanks to special trade legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in Dec. 2006, Haitian-sewn apparel enters the U.S. duty free and the manufacturers can use fabric purchased from anywhere in the world. This gives Haiti a big advantage over apparel exporters to the U.S. who have to source the fabric in the U.S. even if they sew overseas. With lower wages than in many Asian markets and proximity to North America, Haitian-based producers have comparative advantages that might offset the country’s low productivity.

The State Department initially promised that the park would be able to support 65,000 direct jobs by 2020. The Clinton Foundation has made similar statements. That means constructing 40 10,000 square-meter buildings for garment assembly. It won’t happen at the current pace.

The total job-creating capacity since the foundation stone was laid in November 2011 is three assembly buildings and a 10-megawatt power plant. A fourth workshop is under construction but is unlikely to be completed before late spring.

This must be tough to take for the anchor tenant, the Korean manufacturer Sae-A Trading Ltd. It has committed to a $78 million investment at Caracol and currently employs some 4,500 Haitians. It says it wants to hire 20,000. To do so it needs another dozen buildings.

A Dec. 12 IDB press release says the Haitian government is approved for a new $70 million grant to construct, among other things, three new production buildings by 2018 with a goal of providing space for 6,800 workers. Bank officials have to know that putting Haitian government officials in charge of such a project is likely to doom it. But let’s suppose I’m wrong and the buildings go up. The Caracol workforce will then be 11,300—a far cry from the State Department’s estimate of 65,000 direct jobs or even the IBD’s forecast of 40,000.

It’s understandable for the IDB to want to lower expectations. But the target should be higher and it shouldn’t take three years to boost capacity. Craig Miller, president of the Boston-based Waterfield Design Group and a consultant for the Haitian apparel sector, told me that “once the materials are on site, a 10,000 square-meter production workshop can be built in six to eight months.”

Apparel manufacturers in Haiti are hungry for production space but my sources say investors were not given an option to build their own workshops in Caracol. The Clinton planners—Hillary at State and Bill at the Clinton Foundation—wanted to retain that responsibility for reasons that can only be guessed. So now the producers have to wait.

This is tragic for the thousands of Haitians eager to get the sewing jobs. Factory workers earn three times the average income in Haiti’s north. Sae-A produces for a wide number of American labels, such as Target and Wal-Mart, WMT +0.48% Wal-Mart Stores Inc. U.S.: NYSE $89.78 +0.43+0.48% Jan 12, 2015 11:44 am Volume (Delayed 15m) : 1.72M P/E Ratio 18.32 Market Cap $287.99 Billion Dividend Yield 2.14% Rev. per Employee $219,905 01/09/15 Toys “R” Us Holiday Period Sam… 01/08/15 Tesco to Cut Prices, Close Unp… 01/08/15 Stocks to Watch: Family Dollar… More quote details and news » WMT in Your Value Your Change Short position and the American companies regularly dispatch auditors to inspect work conditions. Even without the U.S. Labor Department breathing down its back, Sae-A has incentives to care for workers to retain them and boost productivity. Getting a spot on the assembly line opens the door to economic mobility, and that’s unusual in Haiti.

Haiti has a rare opportunity. Investors want to invest, workers want to work, and consumers want to buy. This seems like a good time for government to get out of the way.

But how did all this begin? 

Bill Clinton’s Shameful Haiti Legacy

He may be playing the hero now, but the ex-president’s trip to Haiti is a reminder of the mess his administration left behind. Bob Shacochis on how Clinton wasted a good invasion.
Like many Haitians and not a few Americans who know the island and its history, I had mixed feelings watching the video of former President Clinton step off a plane on to the tarmac at Toussaint Loverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince on Monday afternoon. Bill Clinton, the Second Coming of Hope. The First Coming, the U.S.-led invasion in 1994 adorned with 20,000 American troops, did not turn out so well. By 1996, when the American military decamped, you’d be hard pressed to find a Haitian on the streets of Port-au-Prince who wasn’t suffering miserably from hope. By 1996, Haitians were scratching their heads in bewilderment, asking themselves Why has America come to save us? Who will save us now? Ten years later, by almost every measure, Haiti was worse off than it was before Clinton had “rescued” it from the illegitimate regime of General Raoul Cedras and his gang of terrorist enforcers, known by the acronym FRAPH.

I had heard the Haitians saying of the U.S. after the American troops went home: “Lave men ou, siye li a te. It looks like you wash your hands and dry them in dirt.”

It’s the proper time, of course, to ask what is the legacy of American foreign policy in Haiti, a beleaguered neighbor that we have invaded and occupied twice in the 20th century, the first time to preempt German influence there during and after World War I, the second time during the early years of the Clinton administration, an 18-month long intervention which I reported on for Harper’s magazine.  

Looking at the images pouring out of Haiti these days, what comes immediately into focus is the near-sighted, irrational nature of what is out of focus in American foreign policy since the Marshall Plan worked its miracles on a shattered planet. I think that we can all agree that Haiti has finally found its bottom, but the descent, lubricated by man-made folly, was not inevitable.

To be sure, Haiti brings out the cynic in me. Perhaps I should express that sentiment with more precision: The United States’ two-faced relationship with Haiti stirs a cynicism within me that I’d rather not claim.

The U.S. Army came ashore in September 1994 locked and loaded to do battle with a military dictatorship composed of a tiny dysfunctional army and roving bands of FRAPH’s homicidal thugs, who threatened to send America’s sons and daughters back home in coffins. Essentially an absurd boast but from a genuine enemy. Colin Powell’s brinkmanship defused the potential for bloodshed on the eve of the invasion, yet the fact remained—our soldiers would be liberating villages, towns, and cities controlled by a terrorist organization that had brutalized the population.

Early on, there were shootouts between U.S. soldiers and FRAPH. Special Forces hunted down FRAPH leadership in the countryside, captured them and shipped the detainees to headquarters in Port-au-Prince, where, to general dismay, they were invariably released. One night, hunkered down with a detachment of Green Berets in the mountains south of Cap Haitien, I listened in alarm to a radio transmission from Col. Mark Boyatt, the overall commander of Special Forces in Haiti, telling his commandos to begin regarding FRAPH as Haiti’s “loyal opposition,” as if the terrorists, overnight, had become Haiti’s equivalent to the Republican Party, rehabilitated patriots eager to remake Haiti into a modern democratic nation.

Months later, when I challenged Colonel Boyatt on this highly counterproductive order to his troops, he clammed up on me. For the next two years, I tried to track down who in the chain of command had told Boyatt to whitewash the terrorist organization FRAPH. The trail finally led to the American Embassy in Port-au-Prince, and then it jumped to the mainland, Sandy Berger, and the White House.

Legacy No. 1: We left the poison in the system. The result: A Haiti rendered ungovernable by our heedless self-interest. The only Devil in Haiti is to be found in the deals we cut with the worst elements in that society. Sound familiar?

On March 31, 1996, the United States handed over Operation Restore Democracy to the United Nations and a peacekeeping force that has been there ever since. Early in the Clinton administration’s intervention in Haiti, the word came down to the boots on the ground from the White House: You have not been deployed to conduct nation-building. The mission turned out to be foolishly attenuated: Restore Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, to the National Palace. Hold elections that will remove the troublesome Aristide from the National Palace. Go home.

Ultimately, the mission ended up profoundly disillusioning not only the Haitians but the American troops as well. Back at Fort Bragg, I asked a Special Forces Master Sergeant if he was glad he went to Haiti. “Tough question,” he said. “No carpenter likes to build a house and see it crooked and leaning and ready to fall down the day he leaves. But if he builds a nice house, he’s happy about it, it’s something he’ll be proud of the rest of his life.”

“You don’t think you have anything to be proud of?” I asked.

“No.”

“That’s sad,” I said.

“It is,” said the Master Sergeant. “It is.”

I told him what I had heard the Haitians saying about the United States after the American troops went home. Lave men ou, siye li a te. It looks like you wash your hands and dry them in dirt.

Legacy No. 2: In Haiti, America wasted a perfectly good occupation. Call our post-earthquake presence there anything you want, but let’s hope it works out better this time around. Good luck, Bill. And remember, merry are the builders.

Bob Shacochis, a professor at Florida State University, is the author of The Immaculate Invasion, a chronicle of the 1994 U.S. intervention in Haiti.

 

 

 

French Government Does NOT Get a Pass

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The world watched in horror the bloody events in Paris at the hands of militants. A great deal of work is going into investigations and research to determine names, backgrounds, connections and causes of the terror in France.

The background, cells and names rising to the surface are not new to the intelligence communities allied with the United States. What is new is that the governmental leadership(s) in Europe, North Africa and the West ignored the intelligence clarion calls for alarm.

Going back to 2005 and even earlier, mining open source information, the Buttes Chaumont information has been out there. The brothers of the Paris attacks were only the most recent members of the Buttes Chaumont terror cell. There were clearly other brothers and members that were festering a decade ago.

 

‘The first cell in this network was named the “19th arrondissement” or “Buttes Chaumont” cell, which both brothers were a part of. Farid Benyettou, a charismatic self-taught preacher who lectured outside various mosques and prayer groups, including the Addawa mosque of the 19th arrondissement, led this cell. Although Redouane died, Boubaker was in charge of a way station in Syria for French youths headed to Iraq. El-Hakim did not last long, though, since the Assad regime arrested him in 2004, imprisoned him for a year, and then extradited him to France in 2005.
El-Hakim would be sentenced in 2008 to seven years for his involvement in the recruitment ring. This would have kept him imprisoned through 2015, but he ended up only serving 2/3 of his term and was then deported to Tunisia sometime in 2012. Since then, el-Hakim’s name has popped up in reports on militants around Chaambi Mountain in western Tunisia. Again, it is hard to assess these claims since there is almost no way of independently verifying them. That said, due to his past connections within a jihadi recruitment network and al-Qaeda in Iraq, it would not be far-fetched if he indeed did have some type of connection or relationship with AQIM.
At the same time, due to the murky nature of el-Hakim’s presence in Tunisia and the dearth of solid information on the connections between AQIM and AST, it is too early to come to any real conclusions.’

The New York Times is data mining as well as has offered some current insight but the paper omits the feeble policy by the French leadership to deal with the dark yet active cell connections in France and in Northern Africa. The intelligence IS there but quite possibly passed to the side out of lack of law enforcement, lack of policy and lack of will.

It is a tragedy that France had to deploy more that 85,000 personnel to track down the killers in France while some many victims died. For the next several weeks, collaboration on intelligence and policy will occur include the United States.

PARIS — They jogged together or did calisthenics along the hilly lawns and tulip-dotted gardens of Buttes-Chaumont, the public park in northeastern Paris built more than a century ago under Emperor Napoleon III. Or they met in nearby apartments with a janitor turned self-proclaimed imam, a man deemed too radical by one local mosque because of his call for waging jihad in Iraq.

The group of young Muslim men, some still teenagers, became known to the French authorities as the Buttes-Chaumont group after the police in 2005 broke up their pipeline for sending young French Muslims from their immigrant neighborhood to fight against American troops in Iraq. The arrests seemingly shattered the group, and some officials and experts were skeptical that members ever posed a threat to France.

But the shocking terror attacks last week in Paris have now made plain that the Buttes-Chaumont network produced some of Europe’s most militant jihadists, including Chérif Kouachi, one of the three terrorists whose three-day rampage left 17 people dead and who was killed by the police.

Other alumni from the group have died in Iraq or remained committed to radical Islam, including a French-Tunisian now aligned with the Islamic State who has claimed responsibility for a handful of assassinations in Tunisia, including the July 2013 murder of a leading left-wing politician.

“They were considered the least dangerous,” Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East studies and specialist on French Islamic terror cells, said of the Buttes-Chaumont group. “And now you see them really at the forefront.”

Now French authorities, while still piecing together how such violent attacks could have been staged in the capital, must also be concerned by the possibility that other homegrown groups may be passing unnoticed — or may be similarly underestimated.

The attacks suggest the prospect of a potent intermingling among some members of the original Buttes-Chaumont group and other extremists. Their meeting place, apparently, was the French prison system.

There, their radicalism hardened as some members of the group came together with other prominent jihadists who were connected to more extensive and dangerous militant networks.

For decades, France has endured Islamic terror threats and attacks, from Iranian-inspired groups during the 1980s, to Algerian extremists in the 1990s, to cells linked to Al Qaeda before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

More recently, French and other European security services have grown increasingly alarmed by thousands of young, alienated Muslim citizens who have enlisted for jihad in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq.

In each decade, a familiar pattern has emerged: a radicalized minority of European Muslims — whether they have gone abroad for jihad or not — have been angered and inspired by wars the West has waged in the Arab world, Africa and beyond, and have sought to bring the costs of those conflicts home.

After French authorities swept up members of the Buttes-Chaumont group in the 2005, during his time in prison Chérif Kouachi came under the sway of an influential French-Algerian jihadist who had plotted to bomb the United States Embassy in Paris in 2001.

There, he also recruited a holdup artist named Amedy Coulibaly, the man who killed four hostages at a kosher supermarket in Paris on Friday.

It is unclear if his older brother, Saïd Kouachi, who also took part in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper office, was a member of the Buttes-Chaumont group, but the authorities have confirmed that the older brother spent time in Yemen between 2009 and 2012, getting training from a branch of Al Qaeda.

 

Felony Charges Against General Petraeus?

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Prosecutors Said to Seek Felony Charges against Petraeus

By and

To keep him from running for president?

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors have recommended bringing felony charges against retired Gen. David H. Petraeus for providing classified information to his former mistress while he was director of the C.I.A., officials said, leaving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to decide whether to seek an indictment that could send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison.

The Justice Department investigation stems from an affair Mr. Petraeus had with Paula Broadwell, an Army Reserve officer who was writing his biography, and focuses on whether he gave her access to his C.I.A. email account and other highly classified information. F.B.I. agents discovered classified documents on her computer after Mr. Petraeus resigned from the C.I.A. in 2012 when the affair became public.

Mr. Petraeus, a retired four star-general who served as commander of American forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has said he never provided classified information to Ms. Broadwell, and has indicated to the Justice Department that he has no interest in a plea deal that would spare him an embarrassing trial. A lawyer for Mr. Petraeus, Robert B. Barnett, said Friday he had no comment.

Mr. Holder was expected to decide by the end of last year whether to bring charges against Mr. Petraeus, but he has not indicated how he plans to proceed. The delay has frustrated some Justice Department and F.B.I officials and investigators who have questioned whether Mr. Petraeus has received special treatment at a time Mr. Holder has led an unprecedented crackdown on government officials who reveal secrets to journalists.

The protracted process has also frustrated Mr. Petraeus’s friends and political allies, who say it is unfair to keep the matter hanging over his head. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, wrote to Mr. Holder last month that the investigation had deprived the nation of wisdom from one of its most experienced experts.

“At this critical moment in our nation’s security,” he wrote, “Congress and the American people cannot afford to have his voice silenced or curtailed by the shadow of a long-running, unresolved investigation marked by leaks from anonymous sources.”

Since his resignation from the C.I.A. on Nov. 10, 2012, Mr. Petraeus has divided his time between teaching, making lucrative speeches and working as a partner in one of the world’s largest private-equity firms, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.

Mr. Holder has said little publicly about the investigation. the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked by reporters in December why it was taking so long, said: “I can’t say. I mean, I guess I could say, but I won’t say.”

Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman, declined to comment on the investigation. Several officials who discussed it did so on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

At a news conference shortly after Mr. Petraeus resigned, President Obama said he had no evidence that Mr. Petraeus had disclosed classified information “that in any way would have had a negative impact on our national security.”

“We are safer because of the work that Dave Petraeus has done,” Mr. Obama said, referring to his career in government. “And my main hope right now is — is that he and his family are able to move on and that this ends up being a single side note on what has otherwise been an extraordinary career.”

But investigators concluded that, whether or not the disclosure harmed national security, it amounted to a significant security breach in the office of one of the nation’s most trusted intelligence leaders. They recommended that Mr. Petraeus face charges, saying lower-ranking officials had been prosecuted for far less.

Federal agents stumbled onto the affair after Jill Kelley, a friend of Mr. Petraeus, complained to the F.B.I. that she had received anonymous threatening emails about her relationship with Mr. Petraeus. F.B.I. agents opened a cyberstalking investigation, traced the message to Ms. Broadwell and began searching her emails. That is when they discovered evidence that she and Mr. Petraeus were having an affair.

Mr. Petraeus is said to have begun the affair with Ms. Broadwell in 2011, soon after taking the job at the C.I.A. and she was interviewing him for her book, “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.”

Mr. Petraeus resigned from the the C.I.A. three days after Mr. Obama was re-elected. In a brief statement, Mr. Petraeus admitted to the affair, saying that “after being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment.”

“Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours,” Mr. Petraeus said, referring to the C.I.A. “This afternoon, the president graciously accepted my resignation.”

Mr. Petraeus, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, took command of American forces in Iraq in 2007, one of the lowest points in the war. Al Qaeda controlled large parts of the country, and dozens of American soldiers were dying each month. Mr. Petraeus directed the so-called “surge” of American forces that helped stablize Iraq enough so that the United States could withdraw its troops under Mr. Obama. In 2010, Mr. Obama chose him to lead American forces in Afghanistan, where the Taliban was gaining territory. Mr. Petraeus had some success — although not nearly as much as he had in Iraq.

Along with his acumen on the battlefield, Mr. Petraeus was considered a natural political operator in Washington, where he easily navigated the politics of Congress, the White House and the Pentagon. He fielded calls to run for president and cultivating a larger-than-life media image. All the while, he remained a trusted adviser to Mr. Obama, who appointed him to lead the C.I.A. in 2011.

Threat to NATO via Russian Aggression

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Poland to Seek NATO Response to Russia’s Military Exercises

(Reuters) – Poland expects the NATO alliance to step up its military exercises around the Baltic Sea after a flurry of activity by Russian warships and jet fighters in the area last month, Defence Minister Tomasz Siemoniak told Reuters in an interview.

Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak, Oct. 14, 2014

“What happened in December was indeed rather unprecedented,” Siemoniak said. “We will definitely want the Baltic Sea to be taken into account to a greater extent, and I think that in terms of military exercises planned by NATO, there will be such a reaction,” he said. The interview was conducted on Monday but authorised for release by the ministry on Thursday.

The Atlantic alliance has already increased the frequency of air patrols in the region, part of a revival of Cold War tensions sparked by Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and its support for Ukraine’s pro-Russian rebels.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visits anti-submarine ship Vice Admiral Kulakov, Sept. 23, 2014

Siemoniak said Moscow did not have an exit strategy, and that NATO and the European Union, which has imposed sanctions on Russia together with the United States, should brace themselves for years of conflict.

“We shouldn’t talk about lifting the sanctions too soon,” he said, adding that they were the most effective tool at the West’s disposal.

The French government in November put on hold a contract to supply Mistral warships to Russia after coming under pressure from NATO allies.

Asked if French-based companies such as Airbus and the Thales could suffer as they bid for contracts in Poland’s $41 billion army modernisation programme, Siemoniak said: “I’m counting on France‘s decision (not to deliver) being permanent, so the problem has been solved. It seems that Russia has also accepted that.”

Siemoniak also denied that a U.S. Senate report, which in December made clear by implication that Poland had allowed the CIA to run secret detention facilities on its soil, had damaged the relationship between the two allies.

Polish officials have expressed disappointment that the published version of the report contained enough detail to implicate Poland, putting it at risk of reprisal attacks.

“I think that, at the moment, the cooperation between our intelligence agencies is the best in history,” Siemoniak said, “so the publication of the report has not made it more difficult.”

CyberWar Vulnerabilities

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A Hacker’s Hit List of American Infrastructure

In an 800-page document dump, the U.S. government revealed critical vulnerabilities.

On Friday, December 19, the FBI officially named North Korea as the party responsible for a cyber attack and email theft against Sony Pictures. The Sony hack saw many studio executives’s sensitive and embarrassing emails leaked online. The hackers threatened to attack theaters on the opening day of the offending film, The Interview, and Sony pulled the plug on the movie, effectively censoring a major Hollywood studio. (Sony partially reversed course, allowing the movie to show in 331 independent theaters on Christmas Day, and to be streamed online.)

Technology journalists were quick to point out that, even though the cyber attack could be attributable to a nation-state actor, it wasn’t particularly sophisticated. Ars Technica’s Sean Gallagher likened it to a “software pipe bomb.”

But according to cybersecurity professionals, the Sony hack may be a prelude to a cyber attack on United States infrastructure that could occur in 2015, as a result of a very different, self-inflicted document dump from the Department of Homeland Security in July.

Here’s the background: On July 3, DHS, which plays “key role” in responding to cyber attacks on the nation, replied to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on a malware attack on Google called “Operation Aurora.”

Unfortunately, as Threatpost writer Dennis Fisher reports, DHS officials made a grave error in their response. DHS released more than 800 pages of documents related not to Operation Aurora but rather the Aurora Project, a 2007 research effort led by Idaho National Laboratory demonstrating how easy it was to hack elements in power and water systems.

Oops.

The Aurora Project exposed a vulnerability common to many electrical generators, water pumps, and other pieces of infrastructure, wherein an attacker remotely opens and closes key circuit breakers, throwing the machine’s rotating parts out of synchronization causing parts of the system to break down.

In 2007, in an effort to cast light on the vulnerability that was common to many electrical components, researchers from Idaho National Lab staged an Aurora attack live on CNN. The video is below.

How widespread is the Aurora vulnerability? In this 2013 article for Power Magazine:

The Aurora vulnerability affects much more than rotating equipment inside power plants. It affects nearly every electricity system worldwide and potentially any rotating equipment—whether it generates power or is essential to an industrial or commercial facility.

The article was written by Michael Swearingen, then manager for regulatory policy for Tri-County Electric Cooperative (now retired), Steven Brunasso, a technology operations manager for a municipal electric utility, Booz Allen Hamilton critical infrastructure specialist Dennis Huber, and Joe Weiss, a managing partner for Applied Control Solutions.

Weiss today is a Defense Department subcontractor working with the Navy’s Mission Assurance Division. His specific focus is fixing Aurora vulnerabilities. He calls DHS’s error “breathtaking.”

The vast majority of the 800 or so pages are of no consequence, says Weiss, but a small number contain information that could be extremely useful to someone looking to perpetrate an attack. “Three of their slides constitute a hit list of critical infrastructure. They tell you by name which [Pacific Gas and Electric] substations you could use to destroy parts of grid. They give the name of all the large pumping stations in California.”

The publicly available documents that DHS released do indeed contain the names and physical locations of specific Pacific Gas and Electric Substations that may be vulnerable to attack.

Defense One shared the documents with Jeffrey Carr, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Taia Global and the author of Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld. “I’d agree…This release certainly didn’t help make our critical infrastructure any safer and for certain types of attackers, this information could save them some time in their pre-attack planning,” he said.

Perpetrating an Aurora attack is not easy, but it becomes much easier the more knowledge a would-be attacker has on the specific equipment they may want to target.

* * *

In a 2011 paper for the Protective Relay Engineers’ 64th Annual Conference, Mark Zeller, a service provider with Schweitzer Engineering Laborites lays out—broadly—the information an attacker would have to have to execute a successful Aurora attack. “The perpetrator must have knowledge of the local power system, know and understand the power system interconnections, initiate the attack under vulnerable system load and impedance conditions and select a breaker capable of opening and closing quickly enough to operate within the vulnerability window.”

“Assuming the attack is initiated via remote electronic access, the perpetrator needs to understand and violate the electronic media, find a communications link that is not encrypted or is unknown to the operator, ensure no access alarm is sent to the operators, know all passwords, or enter a system that has no authentication.”

That sounds like a lot of hurdles to jump over. But utilities commonly rely on publicly available equipment and common communication protocols (DNP, Modbus, IEC 60870-5-103,IEC 61850, Telnet, QUIC4/QUIN, and Cooper 2179) to handle links between different parts their systems. It makes equipment easier to run, maintain, repair and replace. But in that convenience lies vulnerability.

In their Power Magazine article, the authors point out that “compromising any of these protocols would allow the malicious party to control these systems outside utility operations.”

Defense One reached out to DHS to ask them if they saw any risk in the accidental document dump. A DHS official wrote back with this response: “As part of a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request related to Operation Aurora, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) National Programs and Protection Directorate provided several previously released documents to the requestor. It appears that those documents may not have been specifically what the requestor was seeking; however, the documents were thoroughly reviewed for sensitive or classified information prior to their release to ensure that critical infrastructure security would not be compromised.”

Weiss calls the response “nonsense.”

The risk posed by DHS accidental document release may be large, as Weiss argues, or nonexistent, as DHS would have you believe. But even if it’s the latter, Aurora vulnerabilities remain a key concern.

Perry Pederson, who was the director of Control Systems Security Program at DHS in 2007 when the Aurora vulnerability was first exposed, said as much in a blog post in July after the vulnerability was discovered. He doesn’t lay blame at the feet of DHS. But his words echo those of Weiss in their urgency.

“Fast forward to 2014. What have we learned about the protection of critical cyber-physical assets? Based on various open source media reports in just the first half of 2014, we don’t seem to be learning how to defend at the same rate as others are learning to breach.”

* * *

In many ways the Aurora vulnerability is a much harder problem to defend against than the Sony hack, simply because there is no obvious incentive for any utility operator to take any of the relatively simple costs necessary to defend against it. And they are simple. Weiss says that a commonly available device installed on vulnerable equipment could effectively solve the problem, making it impossible to make the moving parts spin out of synchronization. There are two devices on the market iGR-933 rotating equipment isolation device (REID) and an SEL 751A, that purport to shield equipment from “out-of-phase” states.

To his knowledge, Weiss says, Pacific Gas and Electric has not installed any of them anywhere, even though the Defense Department will actually give them away to utility companies that want them, simply because DOD has an interest in making sure that bases don’t have to rely on backup power and water in the event of a blackout. “DOD bought several of the iGR-933, they bought them to give them away to utilities with critical substations,” Weiss said. “Even though DOD was trying to give them away, they couldn’t give them to any of the utilities because any facility they put them in would become a ‘critical facility’ and the facility would be open to NERC–CIP audits.”

Aurora is not a zero-day vulnerability, an attack that exploits an entirely new vector giving the victim “zero days” to figure out a patch. The problem is that there is no way to know that they are being implemented until someone, North Korea or someone else, chooses to exploit them.

Can North Korea pull of an Aurora vulnerability? Weiss says yes. “North Korea and Iran and are capable of doing things like this.”

Would such an attack constitute an act of cyber war? The answer is maybe. Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon on Friday, Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said “I’m also not able to lay out in any specificity for you what would be or wouldn’t be an act of war in the cyber domain. It’s not like there’s a demarcation line that exists in some sort of fixed space on what is or isn’t. The cyber domain remains challenging, it remains very fluid. Part of the reason why it’s such a challenging domain for us is because there aren’t internationally accepted norms and protocols. And that’s something that we here in the Defense Department have been arguing for.”

Peter Singer, in conversation with Jason Koebler at Motherboard, says that the bar for actual military engagement against North Korea is a lot higher than hacking a major Hollywood movie studio.

“We didn’t go to war with North Korea when they murdered American soldiers in the 1970s with axes. We didn’t go to war with North Korea when they fired missiles over our allies. We didn’t go to war with North Korea when one of their ships torpedoed an alliance partner and killed some of their sailors. You’re going to tell me we’re now going to go to war because a Sony exec described Angelina Jolie as a diva? It’s not happening.”

Obama said Friday that there would be some sort of response to the hack, but declined to say what. “We have been working up a range of options. They will be presented to me. I will make a decision on those based on what I believe is proportional and appropriate to the nature of this crime,” he said.

Would infrastructure vandalism causing blackouts and water shutdowns constitute an act of war? The question may be moot. Before the United States can consider what sort of response is appropriate to cyber attacks, it must first be able to attribute them.

The FBI was able to finger North Korea for the hack after looking at the malware in the same way a forensics team looks for signs of a perpetrator at the scene of the crime. “Technical analysis of the data deletion malware used in this attack revealed links to other malware that the FBI knows North Korean actors previously developed. For example, there were similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks,” according to the FBI statement. (Attribution has emerged as a point of contention in technology circles, with many experts suggesting that an inside hack job was more likely.)

An Aurora vulnerability attack, conversely, leaves no fingerprints except perhaps a single IP address. Unlike the Sony hack, it doesn’t require specially written malware to be uploaded into a system—malware that could indicate the identity of the attacker, or at least his or her affiliation. Exploiting an Aurora attack is simply a matter of gaining access, remotely, possibly because equipment is still running on factory-installed passwords, and then turning off and on a switch.

“You’re using the substations against whatever’s connected to them. Aurora uses the substations as the attack vector. This is the electric grid being the attack vector,” said Weiss, who calls it “a very, very insidious” attack.

The degree to which we are safe from that eventuality depends entirely on how well utility companies have put in place safeguards. We may know the answer to that question in 2015.